Roundup: Historians' Take

August 20, 2004

Larry Schweikart: The Willy Horton Moment?

Larry Schweikart, at freerepublic.com (Aug. 20, 2004): [Mr. Schweikart is Professor of History, University of Dayton.] Every campaign has a tipping point or two. In 2000, Bush was cruising until the last-weekend revelaion of a DUI. Democratic strategist Bob Beckel estimated that this cost Bush 1 million votes nationally. If so, certainly one can pro-rate that out to say, in another way, that the last-minute smear cost Bush the states of New Mexico, Wisconsin, and probab

August 19, 2004

Tristram Hunt: John Edwards's Intellectual Godfather is Disraeli

Tristram Hunt, in the LAT (Aug. 15, 2004):[Tristram Hunt is the author of "Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City" (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004) and will be teaching at Arizona State University in the fall.]If you haven't heard it yet in this political season, you will: John Edwards' stump theme, the two Americas. "Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one," intones the North Carolina sena

August 19, 2004

Daniel Pipes: The BUSH Administration Is Permitting Outside Monitors of Our Election?

Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (Aug. 16, 2004):Should the United States be sovereign or should it bow before the United Nations and other international institutions? John Fonte of the Hudson Institute showed in an insightful 2002 article,"Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological Civil War Within the West," that portions of the Left wish to do an end-run around Amer

August 18, 2004

Estelle B. Freedman: Historical Alternatives to Mainstream Marriage

Estelle B. Freedman, in the OAH newsletter (Aug. 2004): In light of the Massachusetts state court decision allowing gay marriages, the OAH added a session on “The Peculiar Institution of Marriage” at the annual meeting in Boston last March. My assignment was to provide examples of same-sex unions in the past, but I expanded the charge to ask more broadly about alternative

August 17, 2004

Stanley I. Kutler: How the Neo-Cons Falsified History and Blundered in Iraq

Stanley I. Kutler, in the course of a review of a new book by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order; in the Wash Post (Aug. 15, 2004): Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke are experienced, conservative foreign policy experts. Halper served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, and Clarke had extensive service in th

August 17, 2004

Where the 9-11 Commission Went Wrong

Stephen Gale and Lawrence A. Husick, in an article published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (August 13, 2004): [Stephen Gale is Co-Chairman of FPRI's Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Lawrence Husick is a Senior Fellow with FPRI's Center.]Almost three years after the attacks on September 11, 2001, the 9/11 Commission Report (The Report) has finally provided the nation with both a comprehensive account of the attacks

August 17, 2004

The Yale Historian Who Argues that Islamists Are Acting According to an Ancient Script

Lawrence Auster, at frontpagemag.com (Aug. 16, 2004):[Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers his traditionalist conservative perspective at View from the Right.]When trying to explain the Islamists' global campaign of mass murder, both liberals and conservatives, despite their fierce mutual disagreements, make the same underlying mistake. People on the anti-war left believe that Al Qaeda at

August 16, 2004

Martin Marty: Have All People at All Times Shared Basic Human Values Like Freedom?

Martin E. Marty, in his weekly newsletter, Sightings (Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School) (Aug. 14, 2004): "Strange bedfellows: Paul Wolfowitz and Hillary Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Friedman and William Safire" applauded the last State of the Union Address (2002) with its claim (paraphrased accurately here by anthropolo

August 13, 2004

Stephan Thernstrom: Kerry's Phony Test for War

Stephan Thernstrom, in a letter to the Wash Post (Aug. 12, 2004): Robert Kagan offered a thoughtful critique of the "Kerry Doctrine" -- that the United States goes to war only "because we have to." I suggest another example he failed to mention. Did President Abraham Lincoln really have to use force to preserve the Union in 1861? After all, the people of several Southern states were only asserting a rig

August 11, 2004

Daniel Pipes: The Saudis' Covert P.R. Campaign

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (Aug. 10, 2004):A range of public figures—former ambassadors, university professors, think tank experts – routinely opine in America about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia while quietly taking Saudi funds. They learnedly discuss Arabian affairs on television, radio, in public lectures, and university classrooms. Having no visible connection to Saudi money, they speak with the authority of disinterested U.S. experts, enjoying more credibility than, say, another bi

August 7, 2004

Juan Cole: Do People Want to Hurt us Because We're on the Offensive?

Juan Cole, at his blog (Aug. 3, 2004):A sound bite from President Bush on Monday strikes me as emblematic of the country's current crisis. He said,"It is a ridiculous notion to assert that, because the United States is on the offensive, more people want to hurt us," he said."We’re on the offensive because people d

August 7, 2004

Max Boot: John Kerry ... Isolationist, Realist AND Idealist

Max Boot, in the LAT (Aug. 5, 2004):If I read the tea leaves at the Democratic convention correctly, it seems that John F. Kerry served in Vietnam. But seeing as how Vietnam vets run the gamut from doves like Ron Kovic to hawks like Oliver L. North, Kerry's four months "in country" don't tell us much about what he would do in the next four years as president.

August 5, 2004

Asim Ali: The Democrats Are Stealing the Republicans' Rhetoric

Asim Ali, in a message posted on H-Peace (Aug. 3, 2004): I was somewhat surprised by the Kerry/Edwards war rhetoric. As one commentator on PBS (David Brooks?) put it, the Democrats were attacking the Republicans from the right. One reason for doing so was apparently to distance themselves from the the Democratic Party of the Vietnam War era, which is/was accused of being weak. I find this odd, because general sentiment in the US now seems to be that both the Vietnam War, a

August 4, 2004

Gary B. Nash and Maurice Barboza: How Many Black Soldiers Fought in 1776?

Gary B. Nash and Maurice Barboza, in the NYT (July 31, 2004): Back in 1925, American society tended not to advise young white males about the consequences of intimacy with the black maid. Even if the 22-year-old Strom Thurmond considered himself a father, the standards of the time did not require him to give the daughter born of that intimacy any love, support or acceptance. He di

August 3, 2004

Daniel Pipes: The Muslim "Moderate" Who Wasn't

Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.org (Aug. 3, 2004):In 2002, the spokesman for FBI director Robert Mueller memorably described the American Muslim Council (AMC) as the “the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States.” A year later, the Catholic bishops called the AMC “the premier, mainstream Muslim group in Washington.”Its founder and long-time chief, Abdurahman Alamoudi, was a Washington fixture. He had many meetings with both Clintons in the White H

August 3, 2004

Robert Dallek: What Kerry Can Learn from JFK

Robert Dallek, in the WSJ (Aug. 3, 2004): ... Mr. Kerry enters the fall campaign in as strong a position as any Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 and his prospects are certainly stronger than Bill Clinton's in 1992, when Bush 41 had his decidedly successful war against Iraq to his credit. Like Mr. Carter, who had the advantage of run

July 31, 2004

Robert Caro Introduces Ted Kennedy at the Democratic Convention

Robert Caro, speaking at the Democratic National Convention (July 27, 2004):[Transcript published at dems2004.org.]It is truly an honor to introduce to this convention Edward M. Kennedy. He is a member of a family which has written so many shining chapters in American history. And during his own four decades in the United States Senate, he has been writing, quietly but with great statesmanship and courage, a shining chapter of his own. It is espec

July 28, 2004

Caleb Carr: The 9-11 Commission Is Wrong ... We Are at War with Terrorism, Not Extreme Islamism

Caleb Carr, in the Wash Post (July 28, 2004): [The writer is professor of military history at Bard College and the author, most recently, of"The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians." ] Toward the end of its widely praised report, the Sept. 11 commission offers a prescriptive chapter titled"What to Do?" There, it makes an assertion that is genuinely shocking. It

July 28, 2004

Francis Fukuyama: We Need to Build States that Are Failing

Francis Fukuyama, in the WSJ (July 28, 2004): At the beginning of the 20th century, Britain and America took in less than 10% of GDP in taxes; by the 1970s, that figure had grown to over 50% for most of continental Europe and 40% in the U.S. Communism, of course, represented the ultimate effort of the state to take over the whole of the economy and civil society. Ronald Reagan and Margaret

July 27, 2004

Daniel Pipes: The 9-11 Commission Should Be Congratulated for Correctly Identifying Our Enemy

Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (JUly 27, 2004): Finally, an official body of the U.S. government has come out and said what needs to be said: that the enemy is “Islamist terrorism … not just ‘terrorism,’ some generic evil.” The 9/11 commission in its final report even declares that Islamist terrorism is the “catastrophic threat” facing the United Sta